Yes, Boomers Screwed Up, and That’s Why I Worry About the Future
Boomers are leaving behind a mess; our kids and theirs are left to clean it up, if they can.
The Boomer mill wheel, 70 years in the making, is crushing the future
This essay continues a familiar drumbeat to those who have followed my various social media postings over the past few years. For more than a decade I have felt like Cassandra among the disbelievers, the deniers, the hopeless optimists who don’t want to face the reality that the mill wheel of destruction is grinding down everything Boomers thought we had built up. To hear Millennials tell it, Boomers are the root cause of today’s problems across the board, and, the more they say it, the more I begin to believe it. The vitriol the younger generations reserve for their parents and grandparents seems to reach new heights of disdain every day. Clearly, we have done little right, and almost everything wrong. Put us on the ice flow and be done with it.
It their disdain is justified, then, ironically, Boomers are the motive force turning that massive stone; Boomers are the creators of the mill wheel that is reducing our institutions to dust. And while my generation — now derisively called Boomers and reviled on social media— will not be around to see the ultimate fate of the world’s societies — our children and grandchildren will witness the wheel’s final rotations.
Let’s begin with the current pandemic, and then move on to the climate, the economy, social media and society, politics, and foreign existential threats.
A family separated by time and distance
I am 72. I have three children — girl, boy, girl, ages 38, 37, and 33 respectively — and three grandchildren — boy, girl, boy, ages 6, 3, and 1. My two daughters and the two youngest grandchildren live in the U.S. My son and his son live in Australia. My wife and I are able to regularly visit our daughters who live a state away in North Carolina. The relative ease with which we can visit our Tar Heel family does not apply when it comes to seeing our son and grandson.
